All Black Tech Everything!

Why the 2020 Marks the Birth of Wakanda

By F.S. Johnson

It
was just a year ago that the black community clamored to find Kente
cloth and dashikis to don to the cinematic pilgrimage that was Marvel’s
“Black Panther”. Not since the era of Spike Lee and his offerings of Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992), has the entire black diaspora been so emotionally drawn to a motion picture. In many ways, Black Panther made Wakanda real in the collective consciousness of the black diaspora. I
drew a special pride from the film since I personally know two of the
film’s stars. I’ve known Chadwick Boseman, who plays King T’Challa/Black
Panther, since our undergraduate days at Howard University. I
also had the pleasure of watching Michael B. Jordan, who plays the role
of Killmonger, grow up from a young teenager in our hometown of Newark. Both
Michael and I graduated from, (albeit different eras) the prestigious
Newark Arts High School in New Jersey, which is the country’s first
public high school for the performance and visual arts. But even if I
didn’t know the two leading men on a personal level, I would have been
like the millions of other black folks who were moved by the film for
the many reasons that captivated us all – Black Excellence on display in
our full glory.

The story of a technologically advanced African nation that chose to hide itself from the world, using the very technology they vow to protect, ran many parallels to the story of black excellence in America. For me, it takes me back to the poetic words of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s We Wear the Mask. Dunbar’s powerful poem read,